On trade, Mr. Obama served up a disappointing echo of the objections of trade unions to free-trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea. He claimed that he opposed the deal with Colombia because trade union leaders there were being "targeted for assassination," though there has been a dramatic decrease in such killings ...

While there has been a substantial recent drop in the number of disappearances/killings of labor organizers in Colombia, from the horrendous to the merely horrific, this is in no way due to prosecutorial zeal on the part of the government. As it is implicitly understood in Colombia that the government is complicit, to put it kindly, in these murders their inability to find themselves and bring themselves to justice is understandable. The basic actuarial reason for this upsurge of non-killing is, of course, the fact that they are running out of people to kill (see Iraq for a similar pre-Surge dynamic.) Given that the average life span of a Colombian labor organizer can be measured in weeks, recruiting has consequently suffered. To a religious free marketeer the only good labor consists of the cheap and the dead and now that those willing to object to the former have largely been consigned to the latter there is little reason not to send more deserving American jobs off on another tropical offshore cruise.